Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Ickenham

Yes. Ickenham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are UB10. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hillingdon. Overhanging branches clear the roof of a car and catch the roof of a van, so the drive is looked at from the driver seat rather than from the doorstep. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The whole bathroom fits on a trolley in one load. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

These were built with a separate dining room, and most have had the wall between it and the kitchen taken out with a steel put in above. The original bathroom in these houses is the small room over the hall, and a vanity in it is short, shallow and hard against a wall at each end, so both ends are scribed and there is no tolerance left between them. An original bathroom is usually the smallest room upstairs. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Half-tiled walls leave a line the top has to meet.

A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. The way into a bathroom ends at a door that opens inward. On a drive that only takes one vehicle nose-in, the van has to reverse the whole length of it to get back out, which decides which way it goes in. A bathroom booked on its own rarely fills a day, so it can be put into whichever part of the day the street is easiest. A bay for twenty minutes is enough for a vanity.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. Where several bathrooms are done in one building the tops come off one slab run, because two greys from two batches sit badly on adjoining floors. A landlord specifying once is specifying tap holes once. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. A house divided into flats needs a vanity for each of them, and small repeated pieces are the one case where buying a whole slab makes sense. En-suites and family bathrooms rarely take the same depth.

An island carries its own edge detail all the way round, so a mitred 100mm apron on four sides is four mitres cut, bonded and polished before the piece ever leaves the bench. That shape decides what is left on the slab when the kitchen has been cut, and what is left on the slab is where most vanity tops come from. The bathroom pieces are labelled on the nest before the saw runs. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. A vanity has no depth to lose, so where a kitchen run would take a ten millimetre scribe without noticing, a shallow top cannot spare it. A cloakroom under a stair slope limits the tap before the top. Settle the tiling height and the basin model first, and let us know whether the unit is standing on the floor or hanging off the wall. An owner paying for this directly tends to want the reasoning as much as the number, so a quote that explains why a join sits where it does is worth more than a cheaper one that does not. Who is paying decides the material here more than anywhere else, because a vanity is small enough that an expensive stone stops being an expensive decision. Whoever chooses the tap is setting the hole spacing.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Waterfall ends are cut in sequence off the length either side of the top so the vein carries down the leg, and that sequence is gone the moment a piece has to be recut. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. What the kitchen cannot use, the vanity usually can.

Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. The boxed soil stack in the corner is the usual version of it upstairs, and a top that notches round one loses depth exactly where the basin wanted it. What is behind the plaster decides how a vanity is fixed.

A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. A wall-hung unit puts the whole weight into the wall rather than onto the floor, so what the wall is built of stops being a detail. The top follows the unit, and the unit follows a level.

The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. What the route really decides for a bathroom is the shelving and the window board, since long thin pieces are the ones that break when they are twisted round a turn. A splash return travels with the top it belongs to.